


Veal piccata with lemon caper sauce

by Melime



Category: Leverage
Genre: Cooking, Domestic, Fluff, Multi, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 22:01:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13086249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime
Summary: In which Eliot just wants to cook dinner and Hardison and Parker keep getting in the way, but even so he still loves them.





	Veal piccata with lemon caper sauce

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meils121](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meils121/gifts).
  * Translation into Português brasileiro available: [Vitela piccata com molho de limão](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13412769) by [Melime GreenLeaf (Melime)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime%20GreenLeaf)



> I should probably say I know very little about cooking so this involved a lot of googling recipes that sounded fancy enough.

Eliot placed the box of groceries carefully on the floor, going to look for his keys. Of course he had to do this alone, and changing all his plans for dinner while he was at it, because Hardison just had to go ruin all of Eliot’s plans in the worst way possible.

Who even buys red wine when they had seafood planned for dinner? Not even salmon or another high fat fish, no, because then red wine would be acceptable. No, they were having tilapia piccata with lemon caper sauce, as he had said the previous night, so there was no reason for Hardison to have bought the red wine. That was the last time Eliot asked him to take care of the wine, at least if he had asked Parker she would have come back with the right bottle, although perhaps stolen.

So Eliot had to change it last minute to the more traditional veal picatta, and while he was fetching the veal to change dinner, he took the opportunity to buy some ingredients for some simple dishes. Nothing too complicated, just some quick dishes he couple prepare to make sure his partners ate proper food and not whatever they found in the closet or in the fridge. Seared scallops and shrimp with balsamic strawberries, luscious lobster risotto, coconut ginger mussels with bacon, flounder rolls with caponata and arugula, things that he could make when there wasn’t much time to spend cooking, and if he was focusing on seafood, it was Hardison’s fault for making him change his dinner plans so last minute.

He was still trying to find the right keys when Parker called him.

“Need help?” she asked, hanging upside down with half her body still inside the vent, the opening just a few meters away from the door.

“Why are you…?” Eliot gestured at the door, baffled. “You were inside, you could have opened the door for me.”

“Sure.” She got down from the vent, and took her kit out of her pocket, ready to break in.

Then Hardison opened the door from the inside. “You know we do have keys, right? And I can hear you.”

Parker rolled her eyes, but accepted to get through the door instead of climbing back through the vent. “Keys are boring.”

“Hardison, since you’re out here, help me put away these things,” Eliot said, grabbing the box and walking inside.

“And you know you don’t have to run to the grocery store just because you didn’t like my choice in wine, right?” Hardison asked.

“Maybe you’ll think of that the next time I ask you to pick up some wine.”  
“You’re going to hold that over my head forever now, won’t you?”

“No, just the rest of our lives.”

Eliot set the box on the kitchen counter, and starting packing away what he wouldn’t use for dinner.

Hardison followed him. “Is that,” he started, pointing at the box, “all for tonight?”

Eliot shook his head. “No, but if I left this up to you we wouldn’t have any eatable food.”

“Now that’s just wrong. And hurtful,” Hardison said, pretending to be upset.

“You lost this argument when you bought frozen lasagna,” Eliot said. Then he repeated, exasperated, mostly to himself, “Frozen lasagna!”

“How about me?” Parker asked, sitting on the counter, much like a cat in search of high ground.

“You think fortune cookies counts as food.”

“Of course it’s food, anything you can eat is food,” she replied defensively.

“You can eat paper, that doesn’t make it food,” Eliot said, moving around Parker to finish putting the groceries away.

“Anything made to eat counts as food,” Hardison said, trying to help Parker’s side.

“I’m not getting dragged into this argument again. Fortune cookies are a disaster to every baker.”

“And they are tasty,” Parker said.

“No, they…” Eliot stopped,breathing deeply. “If you want, I’ll make you proper cookies.”

“But then they won’t have the fortune inside.”

“I can print some paper to put inside.”

“But then it won’t be my real fortune! Just something you put in there.”

“How do you think fortune cookies are made?”

Hardison laughed, finally having enough. Then he placed himself between them, raising both hands into the air, each one turned to one of them. “How about we agree to disagree on this one?”

“As long as I can still get my fortune cookies,” Parker said.

“You’re going to give Eliot a heart attack.”

“Both of you are going to give me a heart attack unless you let me start on the dinner soon. I’m already two hours late because I had to change the main protein of the dish.”

“I offered to go get a different wine while you cooked,” Hardison pointed.

“And have you bring something completely different then have to start things from scratch again? No, at least this way I know what I’m dealing with. Now either you help or you leave the kitchen.”

Parker rolled her eyes and stood up. “Fine,” she said before leaving.

“Last time I tried to help, you re-did everything I did, so I don’t think I would be of much help,” Hardison said, right before following Parker.

“What did I get myself into?” Eliot asked, just to himself. It wasn’t the first time he did that, but he didn’t have any regrets, although the subject of trying to keep those two properly fed was a headache on the best of days.

Sufficed to say, they didn’t exactly see eye to eye when the subject was food. Which was why Eliot had taken it upon himself to always take care at least of the main meals, not that they had appreciated it by learning the importance of good cuisine.

No, both of them still ate random snacks that could be classified more properly as inorganic matter than as food. In fact, every time Hardison insisted he could make something for them to eat all by himself, Eliot lost five years of his life. Ten, if it was Parker doing the cooking, if you could even call that cooking. They really were hopeless cases, and they were lucky to have him there to make sure they ate the right food at least three times a day.

That, of course, went double for anniversaries, like the one they were celebrating that night. The anniversary of the day they met, just one of the many they celebrated. And if Hardison and Parker had their way, they would probably be eating take out, or pre-prepared food. After all, thanks to Hardison they almost had fish with red wine.

Luckily, adapting the dish wouldn’t bring much trouble except for the need to shop for the missing ingredients, and since that was taken care of, it was a problem of the past.

“Dinner will be ready in thirty!” Eliot yelled from the kitchen.

It was a simple dish, which was part of the reason why he chose it, so it wouldn’t take him long to complete it.

“We’ll set the table,” Hardison said, passing by the kitchen just long enough to get all they needed for the table. He knew better than to interrupt Eliot while he was cooking, especially after already making him change the meal once. If there was one thing Eliot took seriously, it was food.

“Make sure you have the right cutlery this time,” Eliot said, without looking at him.

“That only happened because we have far too much cutlery, more than some restaurants I would say.”

“That’s because not only there is a different kind of cutlery for each dish, also the material they are made can influence the taste of the food so they have to be selected with that in mind. I left the cutlery for tonight in the front of the first drawer.”

“Again, the fact we have more than one cutlery drawer is a good indication that we have too much cutlery for three people.”

“You two are saying cutlery so much it stopped being a word,” Parker said, finally coming after Hardison. “Let me help you carry these things back there.”

Eliot smiled, despite himself. But he still had his back turned to the two, focusing on the veal, so neither of them saw it.

Sometimes the two of them got on his nerves, that was true, and not only when it came to food, but also by taking unnecessary risks during a job and nearly giving Eliot a heart attack (it was his job to keep them safe, and he would die before letting anything happen to them).

Even so, small moments like these were always a good reminder of how much he loved both of them, and how he wouldn’t trade any of this for the world. It took him a long time, and a lot of wrong turns along the way, but he had found his family, and he wanted to spend the rest of his life with these people.

Although, since that was the case, he was definitively going to have to improve their diet.


End file.
